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Many of my clients hate the idea of doing a sales pitch. They’d rather jump into a pit of spiders than start cold calling for leads. But I think there’s a better way of getting your business in front of the right people.
I call this my ‘no sales pitch required method’. Let me explain.
No sales pitch required
Once upon a time, there was a lovely person called Marjorie (not her real name).
Marjorie wanted to get some more clients for her business – a web development agency working in a particular sector. She was working with the world’s best business coach, called Julia*. So, Julia and Marjorie hatched a great plan.
We’d already worked out who Marjorie’s ideal client is and all the other good stuff like how to productise Marjorie’s offering and set her sweetspot price. We just needed to get Marjorie some more meetings with potential clients.
Getting in front of the right people
We invented a really cool reason for Marjorie to get in touch with senior people in companies that were likely to be her ideal clients. Marjorie wrote up a paper with some original research she’d done that’s likely to be of use to the CEO and marketing directors of these companies.
And instead of sending out cold emails with her research, Marjorie rang them up to get their opinions on her research. Asking them if they agreed or not with her findings.
This gave Marjorie a secondary piece of research to use for two interesting blog posts that she can put on her website.
But importantly, Marjorie rang up her potential customers and was able to have interesting conversations with them. At the end of most of these conversations, her target customers asked her about what she did, and she was able to casually explain how she helps people like them.
Get permission to contact them again
Although this was a great start, of course, it’s not enough for them to immediately commission some work. If only it were that easy.
However, after this first conversation about the research, Marjorie then asked them if they wanted to get her useful emails to give them more helpful stuff. About 30% of them said yes. And this is great. Marjorie now has permission to send useful marketing emails to her targets.
But the thing that made the biggest difference was that almost by accident, Marjorie had reached out to both the CEOs and Marketing Directors. Then they spoke to one another about Marjorie’s research, agreeing that it was interesting and useful. They discussed how Marjorie might be able to help them.
And because of this, three different companies became Marjorie’s clients. And everybody lived happily ever after.
*This time the name is real